Although it faces significant obstacles, the French left is stronger today than it was after the 2017 presidential election. Even if the united left fails to obtain a majority on June 19, its presence in parliament will likely increase significantly, alongside its ability to counter Emmanuel Macron’s Caesarist solutions to crises in contemporary France.

Has there ever been a campaign so insipid? So incapable of rousing anyone but the most fevered reactionaries or conflicted social democrats? People will vote, of course, but almost certainly in depressingly low numbers. But they will cast their ballots out of little more than what they regard as biological necessity, and with not much more in the way of enthusiasm.

Only a socialist economy can fulfill workers’ legitimate demands and only a socialist economy can deliver democracy to the people, yet no one in Canada’s Parliament dares to advocate for genuine socialism. The vacuum on Canada’s political left presents an extraordinary opportunity for the Green Party of Canada. The time for eco-socialism has come. The time is now.

Canadians have so much to learn from Cuba, but every day the country’s revolutionary process is demeaned by our government officials and mainstream media. It is evidence of the moral and intellectual backwardness of our political culture that a country which presents a leading example in so many urgent policy areas is routinely ridiculed for its supposed shortcomings.

Last week, in Lviv, an international delegation met with labour organizers and activists. The Swiss weekly newspaper, Die Wochenzeitung, followed the proceedings. What questions are most preoccupying the country’s workers, and why are anarchists angry with parts of the Western left? The following is a report by journalist Anna Jikhareva from Lviv.

In a recent piece for The Breach, writer and organizer Emma Jackson calls for an “expansive left populism” to defeat the far-right. While she identifies many of the fronts on which the left must fight, it remains unclear how populism as such should serve as a working program for broad left demands, given its susceptibility to the politics of reaction.

In this interview, Tariq Ali, the anti-war icon of the 1960s, reflects on some of the most important issues of our time: the situation in Afghanistan, the Western powers and the “war on terror,” political developments in Latin America, the global right-wing upsurge, digital surveillance and democracy, the challenges facing left movements, contemporary capitalism, lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, and much more.

How China and its peoples handle the challenges ahead demands close and critical attention, but it’s time to lose the attitude. As Noam Chomsky recently suggested, either the “United States and China will work together on the critical issues that we all face, or they will expire together, bringing the rest of the world down with them.” Isn’t that what friends are for?

This essay appeared in the October-November 1980 edition of CD. It is the first chapter in a comprehensive history of the Waffle, the movement within the NDP that produced the Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada in 1969. Many of the core ideas of the Waffle were first discussed and debated in the pages of this magazine by the very people who eventually emerged as the movement’s leaders.

What is the experience and future for China and its Communist Party rule? It seems appropriate to consider a number of new books on China that have been published that try to answer this question. In this review, Michael Roberts takes a closer look at Isabella Weber’s How China Escaped Shock Therapy, John Ross’s China’s Great Road, and China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse by System Change Not Climate Change co-founder Richard Smith.